I wanted to write a post about embroidered pillow cases and dish towels, something I think most girls learned to craft in the Boomer era. Usually, I can find all sorts of articles on the web about any topic. But I came up short on this one. In the early 1960s, my mother and grandmother

Did you dress like this, once upon a time? Felt good, huh? 1966, and teenagers flocked to the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. So the police tried to enforce a strict 10 pm curfew, which led to mini-riots, sort of, and that led to the Buffalo Springfield song that beings, “Something happening here / What it

Remember waterbeds? Everyone has at least one story of a waterbed springing a leak. Happened to you or your friend or (in my case) a newlywed cousin. I just found two great pieces about the waterbed. The first, a very entertaining talk and video featuring the creator, Charles Hall, is here, on CNN. The second requires

The Berlin Wall was a part of my childhood. I think a picture of it appeared in the first “My Weekly Reader” that was passed out in 4th grade. The Berlin Wall divided Berlin into free and Communist halves. That was the way it had been my whole life, and what child would anticipate a

Boomers remember Mom getting the groceries in paper bags. And shopping with white gloves on. Admit it: when you were really little you thought your Mom was as pretty as the lady in the picture, right? Heck, most of us remember when those paper bags doubled as garbage bags. Those were also the days before

Some things weren’t better in the good ol’ days. There. I said it. We get dewy-eyed over stuff we remember fondly, and that’s very human of us. The 50s were less complicated, right? Or is it just that we were children and the complications escaped our notice? Here are five things that are better now

Baby Boomers got their music from the radio, right?. We ran to the record stores to pick up the latest albums, but we heard everything first on radio. TV shows like American Bandstand and Hullabaloo reinforced the message, but radio ruled. You can even get books about it, like the one at right. You might be

Should it be idols or ideals? (anyone remember Eric von Zipper and Beach Blanket Bingo?) Anyway, the Lennon Sisters. Everyone’s parents and grandparents watched The Lawrence Welk Show, and the Lennon Sister was as close as that show came to youth. Who were they and where are they now? Fortunately, there are websites that answer

This is a My Turn article that I wrote for the Daily Breeze, and it ran on December 15, 2013. Sadly, the newspaper does not carry the column online, so here is my pdf of the article. If it’s too small for you to read, click on the image. It should appear in a larger